The fonts featured below are all free/libre. Most of them have appeared on the
OFLB website. They
were all designed using George Williams’s fine
FontForge; some work was also done
using Inkscape.
Didact Gothic is a sans-serif font
designed to present each letter in its simplest form. This makes it very suitable
for literacy efforts.
The font supports all of Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, and most of Latin
Extended-A. It supports almost all Latin-alphabet European languages. It also
supports the major Cyrillic scripts, including non-Slavic languages, as well as
modern and polytonic Greek.
The most recent version of Didact Gothic was released on 22 December 2010. Didact
Gothic is relased under the Open Font
License.
Pfennig is a humanist sans-serif font with
support for Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Hebrew character sets. It contains sufficient characters
for Latin-0 through Latin-10, as well as glyphs for all modern Cyrillic
orthographies, the full Vietnamese range, modern Greek, modern Hebrew, and the Pan-African Alphabet.
It supports the standard Roman ligatures and uses OpenType tables for diacritic
placement. The italic faces are true italics, not just oblique.
The most recent version of Pfennig was released on 31 August 2010.
Jura is a family of sans-serif fonts in the
Eurostile vein. It was originally inspired by some work I was doing for the
FreeFont project in designing
a Kayah Li range for FreeMono. (Kayah Li is a language used by a minority
people group in Burma. Because the Burmese government suppresses the teaching of minority
scripts, the Kayah Li script is taught only in schools in refugee camps in Thailand.)
I wanted to create a Roman alphabet using the same kinds of strokes and curves as
the Kayah Li glyphs, and thus Jura was born. It has been expanded to include
glyphs for the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets as well.
The original Kayah Li glyphs have been included in this font. (Note that glyphs
for writing mainstream Burmese are not and never have been a part of this font.)
Whilst most of the glyphs in this font are released under the
Open Font License, the Kayah Li range
are released under the GNU Public Licence, version 3
with the Font Exception.
Jura is available in four weights: Light, Book, Medium, and DemiBold. The most
recent version is 2.4, created on 3 February 2009. A new version is in the works, which will add OpenType diacritic placement and a few glyph improvements.
The Jura family has an unfortunate name clash with Ed Merritt’s
Jura serif font.
Judson is a serif font designed for African literacy.
It contains as many glyphs and precomposed combinations that I know of for all African
languages written in Latin-derived alphabets. It uses OpenType tables for correct placement
of diacritical marks, including stacked marks. Care has been taken so that all characters
are easily distinguished, even in the italic face. The medium roman face has support for
the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
Currently Judson is only available in medium roman, italic and bold roman faces;
at this time there is no bold italic.
Judson is released under the Open Font License.
The most recent version was released on 27 January 2011.
Triod Postnaja attempts to mimic the typefaces
used to publish Old Church Slavonic service books prior to the 20th century. It also provides
a range of Latin letters in the same style, sufficient for the needs of central, northern and
western European languages.
Most Old Church Slavonic fonts that provide Latin ranges are problematic in the Latin
lowercase, because they are not imitating the uncial style; I have attempted to avoid this problem,
especially in lowercase letters with ascenders or descenders.
I created many of the basic Cyrillic letterforms after eyeballing a very low-resolution image of
the repertoire of Monotype Old Bulgarian.
Megrim is an experimental font covering most of the basic ASCII glyphset,
plus enough characters to write most Latin-alphabet European languages.
It is released under the Open Font License. The most recent version was
created on 31 August 2010.
Grana Padano is a medium-weight upright sans-serif
font in roughly the same family as Apple Computer’s historic Chicago font. It has support for Latin
and Cyrillic character sets, containing sufficient characters for Latin-0
through Latin-10, as well as support for Vietnamese and all major Slavic Cyrillic-based languages. It
uses OpenType tables for diacritic placement. The most recent version was released on
29 April 2010.
Echo Outline is an outline font I
created for an album cover I designed. It contains lowercase unaccented
letters, numerals and a few bits of punctuation. It is really only legible at
large point sizes. It is released under the
Creative Commons
BY-NC-SA License.
The 20100919 release from the FreeFont project contains many character ranges
that I designed:
